Jean Echenoz provides an antidote to wartime patriotism

Gary Indiana

1914:

A Novel

by Jean Echenoz

translation by Linda Coverdale

New Press, The

$14.95 List Price

In several recent novels the succinct, startling prose of Jean Echenoz has achieved the condition of a highly durable, transparent membrane, something like the trompe l’oeil mesh often used now to mask scaffolding on building facades under repair. Imposing a Beckettian principle that drastically less is immensely more, Echenoz summons a fulsome picture of his characters and their worlds with a scattering of surgically

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